There was quite a bit of background information about the poison pits, all provided by a narrator, with a movie being the framing device.
The first part of the dream also included flying to a star system for a diplomatic meeting, but it ended up just being about the spacers trying to woo the only girl on the ship (not me. I was the outsider who just somehow managed to join their group and they tolerated. The girl was eventually the getaway driver).
Eventually, we fly to the planet with the pits, as we need to rendezvous with people at a memorial made where bodies were dumped during a great war to take control of the energy crystals mined there. Due to the potency of the crystals, no one knew how to mine them properly, and they were in a mad rush to get them, so they strip-mined them in these giant sulfuric pits.
The casualties of that war were buried in those pits and we were going to discuss the initial burial practices with leaders from that planet, as they weren't happy about it.
Since I wasn't an official part of that group, they told me to go somewhere and busy myself with something. That's when I found the town suspended over the pits. I joined some other people and I started pointing out the discontinuities about the town and the strangeness of them using these black bars so randomly. I pointed out animals camouflaged as other things, and pointed out how the pits vanished and that only one side of the town existed and the rest was a featureless void, and they all got angry with me and chased me away.